How to add affiliate links to a site you built with AI

The code is the easy part now. You describe what you want, you get a working site, and somewhere between the second and third day you start wondering how it makes money.

Affiliate links are the obvious answer for anything with products in it. Here is the bit nobody mentions in the tutorials: getting accepted is harder than getting it built.

Where you’ll be refused

Three doors, all of them shut for the same reason, none of them personal.

Amazon. The Product Advertising API needs ten qualifying referred sales in the trailing thirty days before it will give you product data. You need the data to make the sales. It’s a genuine deadlock and there is no way to check where you stand until you’re through it.

Skimlinks. Automatic rejection for sites with fewer than ten original articles, or without regular verifiable organic traffic. Coming-soon sites are declined outright, and a refusal means ninety days before you can reapply.

Impact. Around $500 a month, aimed at companies over $1m in revenue. Not a threshold you argue with.

None of that is aimed at you specifically. Affiliate networks carry the fraud risk for every advertiser on them, and a brand-new site with no history is indistinguishable from a bad actor until it isn’t. The thresholds are crude because the alternative is manual review at a scale nobody can staff.

Knowing that doesn’t get you in. But it does tell you which doors are worth knocking on.

What actually works, in order

Apply to the networks that will have you. Awin reviews on identity and legibility rather than traffic volume, so a small honest site with a clear description gets through. FlexOffers wants phone and site verification but no traffic threshold. CJ needs a live site with real content. These are slower than a script tag, and the commission is yours.

Get product data that isn’t gated on sales history. This is the piece the incumbents lock. A product API that works from day one lets you build the pages that generate the sales the other platforms want to see before they’ll talk to you. The quickstart is one call and about five minutes.

Automate the linking once you have accounts. Manually maintaining affiliate links across a site is the thing that quietly stops happening in week three. One line of code handles it, and your own network accounts always take priority over anything else.

The honest bit about traffic

Worth saying plainly, because most things written for this audience won’t.

Across roughly sixty million projects built on Lovable, the average is about fifteen visits per project per month. That is the whole distribution in one number. Some sites do very well; the median does almost nothing.

Affiliate income is a percentage of a percentage. Fifteen visitors a month will not produce a meaningful number no matter which platform you use, and anyone quoting you monthly revenue figures for an app with no audience is selling something.

So the sequence matters. Get something people actually visit, then monetise it. Monetisation is a multiplier, and a multiplier on nothing is nothing.

If you do have traffic — a niche people search for, a tool that got shared, a comparison page that ranks — then the numbers work in the ordinary way and the mechanics above are all you need.

What I’d do first

1. Check whether you have anything worth monetising. Real visitors, doing something with intent, on pages with products on them.
2. Apply to one network rather than five. Awin is the most forgiving of small sites and the account is useful everywhere.
3. Solve product data separately from monetisation. They are two different problems and the incumbents conflate them.
4. Put linking on autopilot before you have twenty pages, not after.

If you’ve already got links in place

Worth checking they’re doing what you think. AI-generated pages frequently carry plain retailer links that look right and earn nothing — the code was written to link, not to monetise. A free audit will tell you the split between links going through your own accounts, links being monetised by somebody else, and links earning nothing at all.

No account needed, and it takes about a minute.

Common questions

Can I use Amazon Associates on an AI-built site?

You can join Associates, but the Product Advertising API now requires ten qualifying referred sales in the last thirty days, so you cannot get product data until you have already made sales.

Will Skimlinks accept a new site?

Not usually. Skimlinks automatically rejects sites with fewer than ten original articles or without regular verifiable traffic, and a refusal means waiting ninety days to reapply.

Which affiliate network is easiest to join with a small site?

Awin reviews on identity and how clearly you describe your site rather than on traffic volume, so small legitimate sites do get through. FlexOffers has no traffic threshold but requires phone and site verification.

How much can a site built with Lovable or Bolt earn from affiliate links?

Almost nothing without traffic. The average project built on these tools receives around fifteen visits a month. Affiliate income is a percentage of a percentage, so build an audience first.

Do I need to disclose affiliate links?

Yes. Disclosure is required by advertising rules in the UK, the US and the EU, and by the terms of every affiliate network.